Journal

About a month ago, I bought the CD boxed set of La Monte Young's "The Well-Tuned Piano 81x25 6:17:50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC" over EBay. I hadn't heard the piece before, but I had heard a few of his pieces of drones and sustained tones, and I had read a whole lot about him. I ended up paying about $400 for it. I was expecting it to go to $500, so that was all right. I'm not wealthy, but I believed it would be worth the money, and it was.

I just listened to it for the first time today, and it was wonderful! Lately I've been using my portable digital player from Cowon for most of my listening, so I had ripped the CD's and put them on there in FLAC format like I've been doing for everything. During my listening to the piece, I took a break of about a half an hour at the point between the second and third CD's, mostly because my in-ear Etymotic earphones were kind of bothering me.

I had been planning all week to listen to the piece today, so I had been anticipating it all that time. I couldn't wait to hear it, but I was also afraid of how I would respond to the duration of it. The longest musical piece that I had listened to before was Philip Glass's "Music in Twelve Parts", which is about three and a half hours. However, I had even taken a break or two during that piece, and I'm still planning on going back for another listen sometime soon. Anyway, I'm pleased to be able to say that the five hours did not feel like too long. In fact, as the final hour was winding down, I had that feeling that I would love it if it lasted even longer. Of course, I took a break in the middle, so my attention was only tested for the three hours after the break, rather than the full five hours at once.

The music of "The Well-Tuned Piano" is wonderful and consistently beautiful. The composition consists of sections and subsections that do not come in a fixed organization. Rather, La Monte improvises during each performance to choose the sections to play, and in what order or with how many repetitions. The impression I got of the music was of waves of changing density. His playing moves between a one-note-at-a-time andante to a dense cloud of rapid key strikes, reverberations, and overtones. The dense sections were usually more enjoyable, but the calmer sections were equally welcome for all the functions they serve in mood, dynamic contrast, and modulations. A striking quality of the music is how it maintains a peaceful and meditative mood no matter how active it is. There's not really a lot of tension, but this is music of rich moods and expansive dream worlds.

Concerning the quality and timbre of the sound, I got the impression that this is what a piano should sound like. The piano had a clean ivory and wood sound, and it didn't sound stuffy or too warm. The recording sounded like I was sitting right there on the bench next to La Monte. The only detrimental sounds were the ocassional noises that got picked up, mostly from the audience--several coughs, a sneeze or two, and a few mechanical rumbles and squeaks from the building and outside.

I'm thoroughly happy with this recording and glad I gave up those $400. It's a new favorite, and I see myself in the future listening to it once or twice a year. I'm not sure whether I'll indulge in another listen sometime this winter or wait until the spring to enjoy it again. While listening to it today, I was sitting on a couch and looking at the changing lights from the Christmas tree my family had set up and another strand of lights on the wall. It was a good environment, and it seemed to me a perfectly satisfactory substitute for Marian Zazeela's "Magenta Lights". In the springtime, I want to listen to it while lying outside under a tree.